Voice-Activated Flat Television Set (VAFTS)

At the beginning of the school year, we came up with the idea of
planning a voice-activated flat television set for our project because we
were thinking of the disabled people and the safety of our environment.
To do this we had to research the components of voice recognition and
record the three languages we plan to put in for people who speak English,
Navajo, and Spanish. We each did our part of research on the project. One
group member will be doing the programming of C++ and HTML formats. Two
members worked on finding and recording the three languages to be used.
Another member is building a model or drawing of our work. All the members
did their parts along with helping out with all the research of voice
recognition and brought it all together for our report.

First we had to find out how the activation works. There are
two
general classes called "Speaker-dependent" and "Speaker-independent"
recognition. For Speaker-dependent, the speaker trains the system to
recognize his or her voice by speaking each of the words in the inventory
several times. For Speaker-independent, the device is not trained by the
speakers’ voice, since it was previously trained on samples from many
different speakers.

We found lots of software about voice recognition but we still
don’t know how to put it in a television chip. There’s software called
"Smart Speak." It’s easy to use for programming in Visual Basic and C++
programming. We are thinking of using this software to help us out with
our programming part of the project. We also found a program called
"Phonemes," which explains how voice recognition works. This software
compares the person’s voice with samples of thousands of other voices.
Matches may still be questionable from the words, in which "Phonemes"
looks for common combinations of words that make up a word. For example,
"Phonemes" may look for the word ‘dog’, it will look for little
combinations in the word such as duh, aw, guh. This makes up the word dog.
Once the software identifies the word combinations, it may still find
problems because of homonyms. The software then compares the homonyms with
the rules of sentence structure. For example, they may use the word
‘their’ and at the beginning of the sentence, the word ‘they’re’ may come
up.

Mr. Barak A. Pearlmutter volunteered to be our mentor for our
project. He is an assistant professor at UNM and will be helping us on
our project of Voice Activated Flat Television Sets. His first
organization is Computer Science, his second organization is at the
Department of Neurosciences.